The End as I Know It by Kevin Shay

The End As I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety by Kevin Shay is a very funny novel about Y2K.  It's set in 1998 and follows Randall Knight, a 25-year-old children's singer and puppeteer who quit his job in order to travel cross-country to warn his family and friends about the coming Y2K catastrophe. 

Randall is a likable crackpot, a reasonable guy led astray by internet chatrooms and an obsessive/anxious personality.  Along his increasingly futile journey he encounters other confused types -- survivalists, conspiracy theorists, an Amway family -- and Shay deftly explores the territory on either side of the fine line between legitimate concern and obsessive paranoia.

It's a fun, intelligent novel and I highly recommend it.  Kevin Shay has a website and blog at www.kshay.com.

Comments

[Bob Mottram]

Ah, Y2K, whatever happened to that? I remember in the late 1990s even the government had become quite paranoid about what turned out to be an utter non-event. As the IT manager of a company at the time I had to fill out official forms, and go around putting little stickers on computers to say that they were "Y2K compliant". I knew full well that even if most of the computers were not Y2K compliant it would have had no effect whatever upon the business. The problem only applied to things like accounts software, where dates are being compared.

[Kevin]

Yeah, it was certainly overblown by lots of people. I was too busy finishing up my dissertation to pay much attention to it. The recent media hype about the daylight savings change was even more ludicrous.